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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
AndyHat's LiveJournal:
- 13:39 I hate it when sites exceed planned maintenance windows, but don't bother to update the outage page with new info. Bad bloglines, no cookie.
- 18:05 After many months of searching finally found tr.im/1yl1 at Pope's True Value. Water filter now replaced, and water pressure restored.
- 23:00 Enjoyed Jaap ter Linden's performance of the Bach Cello Suites 2,3&6 at the Nelson Music Room. Some of the most perfect music ever written.
- 00:45 Bolt is cute and funny. Surprised all trailers in 3D, too (Up, Monsters vs Aliens, new Ice Age, and Coraline).
- 13:20 Off to play some sheepshead with the relatives, then consume Thanksgiving dinner (I don't have to do any cooking, thankfully).
- 18:44 Awwww..... tr.im/1gj5
- 22:46 Restaurants in Milwaukee are eerily deserted during Packers games.
- 22:51 Quantum of Solace, meh. Overly complicated action scenes.
- 22:42 Enjoyed the special tapestries exhibit at the Art Institute, then took Amtrak up to Milwaukee for the holiday.
- 01:59 Heh. Extreme Scrabble: tr.im/1fk4
- 02:00 Should hourly workers be paid while their computers boot? tr.im/1fk7
- 02:43 Huge cells: tr.im/1fld
- 00:24 Gino's East, then Lulu. That is one f'ed up opera. Where the heck does Jack the Ripper show up from?
- 00:25 But, it does have fabulous music, and Marlis Petersen's performance as Lulu was amazing.
- 00:26 I also loved the surreal prologues (with bear costume), and the incorporation of filmic elements.
- 08:48 Off to RDU. Hope flights aren't too delayed (snow in Raleigh in November? Craziness!).
- 10:40 RDU's new terminal is very nice. It even has plentiful outlets.
- 13:49 Very pleasant flight, had window seat on my favorite approach to ORD up the lake and west over Lawrence.
- 13:50 Now bumping along on the Blue Line en route to Clark/Lake.
- 01:12 Pizza at Aurelio's, then wonderful opera (Porgy & bess, with Gordon Hawkins as an amazing Porgy), dessert at Smith & Wollensky.
- 01:33 I had forgotten how noisy cities are at night.
- 19:34 "Nothing good comes from adverbs." tinyurl.com/5rrng9
- 19:34 And now, laundry!
- 20:12 Sadie is chewing on my boarding pass for tomorrow. When did she learn to identify those?
- 23:45 Books, magazines, DS, socks, underwear, pants, shirts, t-shirts, phone charger, DS charger, MP3 player, headphones, gloves, all packed.
- 23:45 Toiletries and laptop to be packed in morning, jacket and tuque to be worn. Newspapers are on hold.
- 23:46 I used to be able to remember everything without even thinking about it; amazing how easily forgotten the routine is now that I travel less.
- 02:56 Oh, right! The opera tickets! Just remembered I need to get those out of the desk and into my wallet.
| Saturday, October 6th, 2012 | |
| 6:26 pm | Congratulations to J.A. Pitts for winning this year's Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Honeyed Words. I'll definitely have to read that. (Short list for those interested, since it may take a few days before the web site gets updated: The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan, Grail by Elizabeth Bear, Huntress by Malinda Lo, Rule 34 by Charles Stross, God's War & Infidel by Kameron Hurley, The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski, A Rope of Thorns by Gemma Files, Static by L.A. Witt, and The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff). |
| Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 | |
| 12:08 am | |
| Monday, January 30th, 2012 | |
| 11:50 pm | A reading update Finished rereading Snow Crash for GGNC book club (which was supposed to be yesterday but got moved to Feb 12 due to the hosts' colds). Holds up surprisingly well for 20-year-old cyberpunk. Also started in on this years recommended short story reading with the Stoker prelim ballot. Still waiting on a few books before starting the "Long Fiction" category, but finished up the "Short Fiction". First up were Michael Bailey's "It Tears Away" and Gene O'Neill's "Graffiti Sonata", both in The Shadow of the Unknown (though the O'Neill is apparently a reprint from an out-of-print issue of Dark Discoveries). The best part of these two stories is that they're very short. O'Neill's story at least shows some ambition in its attempt to marry a musical sonata form to the plot development, but it doesn't quite work. The editor's forward notes that "neither myself or any of the talented writers adorning these pages received any payment or compensation." I know lots of small-press horror doesn't make much money, but this isn't something to boast about in the forward. At least these two stories read like trunk stories that should have just stayed there. Not everything in this anthology is bad, though; I read Gary A. Braunbeck's "The Music of Bleak Entrainment", which has a great narrative voice that grabbed me immediately and made for a very enjoyable technological musical Lovecraft pastiche. The Braunbeck was apparently commissioned for a pro anthology edited by John Pelan for Darkside Press that never actually came out (though Camelot Books still optimistically lists it for pre-order). Next was “Hypergraphia” by Ken Lillie-Paetz, published in the iPad-exclusive publication The Uninvited, which seems to me like a bizarrely limited way to distribute a publication. I don't have an iPad, but there was a PDF of this story floating around on the author's web site. Based on that, The Uninvited does have some fantastic graphic design for its stories. The story itself is a decent tale of an author who can't stop writing and tragic consequences. John Palisano contributes an entry for "X" in M Is for Monster, featuring a nasty parasitic monster named Xyx. A disturbing little story. Next is Kaaron Warren's "All You Can Do Is Breathe" (Blood and Other Cravings), a fresh take on a vampire story in which a miner survives a cave-in only to lose everything to a mysterious creature. A very good story that nicely captures the roller-coaster of emotions as the miner is saved, only to lose everything. Moving on to the jury's picks, next up are two stories from The New Yorker, "Atria" by Ramona Ausubel and "Home" by George Saunders. I'm not sure I'd really classify either of these stories as horror, though they touch on horrific events. "Atria" is very much a New Yorker story about rape that takes itself far too seriously and just comes off as trite. George Saunders writes great humor and satire, but in "Home" he takes on the consequences of war for the survivors in a more serious way and falls flat. I didn't much care for either of these. In a similar vein, Stephen King continues to strive for Literary Respectability with "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive" in The Atlantic, which riffs off a terrible minivan crash while trying to capture some insight into class in America, but somehow it just ends up being rather boring. I wish King would leave the sex-crazy poetry professors to Houellebecq, et al, and get back to the horror he's good at. Getting beyond what I can only assume is the Stoker jury's questionable attempt to gain some sort of mainstream respectability for the award, the final two selections are actually good. Nathan Ballingrud's "Sunbleached" (Teeth) is another vampire story, set in a hurricane-ravaged Mississippi. Joshua thinks he can protect his family while gaining the gift of immortality when a vampire is trapped under his house, but things come to an inevitable nasty conclusion. Not the most original premise, but very nicely done. Finally, the best of the "Short Fiction" on this year's ballot, Adam-Troy Castro's "Her Husband's Hands" from Lightspeed Magazine. Set after a future war when soldiers come home as salvaged body parts with their memories in attached devices, this story has some of the most unsettling scenes I've read in a long time, and the ending is one I don't think I'll ever be able to forget. Unlike the Saunders story, Castro really captures the horrible consequences of war. |
| Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 | |
| 2:10 am | March 1, 2010 Feeling a bit sad today, remembering the events of this day last year. It seemed like a good time to go re-read and transcribe from my handwritten scrawl my reactions on receiving Phillip's autopsy report in my inbox not long after. Report of Autopsy Examination "The body is semi-clad in a pair of green nylon swim trunks." They know your name, identified from "papers/ID Tag" but reduce you to "the body." They are the medical examiners. In this system, I am nobody, just a citizen requesting a public record. They will never know how the sight of you in those green nylon swim trunks used to make me tremble slightly and draw me out to the pool with you. But not today. Today I had work to do. I had to stay inside and push meaningless buttons on that silly machine instead of following you out on that first warm sunny day of spring after a too long winter. Now that silly machine brings me this report. Today I cannot push those meaningless button. These words I write longhand. "The myocardium shows no evidence of acute infarction, scarring, or focal lesion."I never doubted your heart, though you did. You loved everyone and everything in the world around you, bringing me joy, too. Yet you always questioned your own heart, with your mother telling you gays are evil, that you're spending too much time with me instead of looking for girls. It wasn't always easy being near you, and seeing in your eyes the conflict of your love for me and the guilt you felt for that love. In time I know you could have accepted the greatness of what your heart told you. But now that heart has stopped. "The parenchyma of both lungs shows moderate congestion without obvious consolidation or focal lesions."What an odd way these examiners have of saying there was water in your lungs. Are they afraid of stating the obvious too obviously? "The stomach contains approximately 10 mL of partially-digested food."Our last lunch together only a few hours before. You wanted Mexican, which I never liked. I got carry-out Chinese next door and then we shared a table. I thought it was funny how you picked out just the steak from the fajita leaving behind a stew of onions and peppers; yet you claimed it was the best fajita you'd ever had. Now the steak has been left behind, too. "The bladder contained urine."That's how we always seemed to end those wonderful sessions relaxing in the hot tub. One of us would eventually have to go pee, and we'd go inside and the world would being moving again. Except for this time, when it seems to have stopped forever for both of us. "Reproductive: Grossly unremarkable.""Unremarkable" is not a word anyone would ever have applied to you in life. You were definitely a shower rather than a grower. Sometimes when I would take you into my mouth, I would think it was too big, but then resting my cheek against the warmth afterward, it always seemed just right. "Brain: The leptomeninges are thin, delicate, and congested."Somehow that seems like it must be a bad thing, whatever the leptomeninges might be. Wikipedia could probably tell me, but they are never mentioned again in the report, so I guess it means nothing. "The decedent is a 29 year old male who was found underwater in a communal hot tub."It was easy to forget it was a communal hot tub. It was always just you and me taking advantage of it, only a few steps from your door. Our private escape except for the occasional passing dog walker or pigeon flying past. This day, though, was so beautiful that someone else did come to the hot tub. He even knew CPR while I have mostly forgotten it since my college first aid class. But it wasn't enough. The paramedics came, they made their efforts, and they took you away from me to become "the body" of this report. "The cause of death in this case is drowning." Such certainty at the end, answering nothing. |
| Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 | |
| 11:05 pm | Pictures I think this album of Edward's pictures from his US trip adequately explains my lack of LJ updates for the past several weeks. |
| Thursday, January 20th, 2011 | |
| 12:31 am | Reading update I've traditionally used LJ for reading logs, so since I finished a couple books in the last couple days, let's see if I can get back in the habit. Yesterday finished Charles Stross' The Fuller Memorandum, the latest in the Laundry Files cycle, in which the British secret service defends our world against the Elder Gods via computational magic. Fun as always, though with most of the really bad nasties off-stage for this one, I didn't enjoy it quite as much as previous entries. It is nice to finally get the back story on Angleton, however. Tonight finished up Thomas Mann's The Tables of the Law in a new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann. This is a novella Mann wrote as an introduction to an anthology of stories on the Ten Commandments, and it's a comedic/ironic retelling of the life of Moses from childhood through the delivery of the Commandments to the Israelites. All of the miraculous events of that period are in here, with Mann carefully suggesting mundane natural causes for all of them. Light and enjoyable and well-crafted. |
| Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 | |
| 12:54 am | Back to LJ, maybe Haven't updated here in over 2 years, having mostly moved to Facebook for updates as that seems to be where most people are nowadays. On the other hand, it seems everybody's on Facebook now: my mother, church members, co-workers, etc., which means there are some things I'm not quite comfortable posting there. So perhaps it's time to go back to the occasional update here. Anyways, for those who don't follow me on Facebook, I've been working in New York City since May, traveling up there Sunday night to Friday night every week. So if you haven't been seeing me around, that's why. Hopefully we'll be finishing up the project this month and I'll have at least a little more time at home to catch up on socializing. In other news, I have a new boyfriend. Unfortunately, it's pretty much the longest-distance possible long-distance relationship; Edward is Chinese and lives in Shanghai. We met in New York, and I've been over to Shanghai a couple times now, and he's coming here for 3 weeks in February (while China shuts down for Chinese New Year). Of course we skype or qq video chat pretty much constantly. There doesn't seem to be any practical way for him to immigrate to the US, so I'm looking for expat jobs in Shanghai. I haven't had a whole lot of luck yet, but hopefully something will come up before too long. Either that, or they'll repeal DOMA, but I don't think we can count on that happening in the next couple years. Other than that, I don't think there's been too much exciting going on. Still playing too much Rock Band 3 and never having as much time to read as I'd like (and the piles of books keep arriving). |
| Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 | |
| 5:20 pm | No more Loudtwitter It was broken for a week anyways, and twitter seems to have reached a critical mass of users in the last few months, so I'm suspending my Loudtwitter cross-posts to Livejournal. In future, if you want to keep up with my quick updates-that-fit-in-140-characters-or-le |
| Monday, December 8th, 2008 | |
| 7:47 pm | Today's swag So, as I twittered Saturday, I finally tracked down the weird circular wrench needed to open my whole-house water filter housing at Pope's True Value in Durham, at the Village Shopping Center. Then Sunday morning I see this. Guess that might not have been the safest place to be shopping, though I didn't feel unsafe when I was there. Anyways, in more pleasant news, today's mail:
That's Prince of Persia for the 360; the new issue of Dalkey Archive's Review of Contemporary Fiction; one of the final books from the abruptly closed Humdrumming Press, Tim Lebbon's novella The Reach of Children; Edge of Our Lives, a collection by Mark Rich from RedJack Books, mostly reprints, with a few new stories; and the newest from Paper Golem, Alembical, containing original novellas by  jaylake, Bruce Taylor, James Van Pelt, and Ray Vukcevich, and companion chapbook Cucurbital, containing four short stories by the same authors, both edited by Lawrence M. Schoen & Arthur Dorrance.Coincidentally, Alembical is the second book I've noticed this week that is using a cover photo under a Creative Commons Attribution License (in this case for "To the Skies -- a photograph by Philipp Geisler of Gertrude Reum's 'Geformte Chromnickelstahlrohre'"). |
| Sunday, December 7th, 2008 | |
| 3:36 am | Daily tweets Yesterday's tweets: |
| 12:47 am | Security fail! I've been using mycheckfree.com for years to pay my utility bills. So tonight, I get an email that purports to be from them informing me that if I had attempted to access online bill payment between 12:30 a.m. and 10:10 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 using Windows, their site may have redirected me to a site that might have infected me with malware which may have escaped detection by virus scanners. I use Opera and Chrome, not IE, so I'm probably safe, but I have no idea if I accessed the site during that time (I quickly log in and schedule payments when I get notification that bills have arrived, so I don't really remember when I used it), and they say they're working with McAfee to provide more information and assessment. So, assuming this is legit, it's good of them to let customers know about the potential problem, though it would have been nice if they'd included a bit more detail on the malware in question. But they obviously have very little clue about how to handle this sort of thing. The email they sent was mailed from mail17c.mkt030.com, and the return address is ebillinfo@customercenter.net. Links in the mail go to links.mkt030.com. That may be a legit bulk mailing company, but who knows? They have a mechanism in place to deliver messages via the web site after you log in, so I check that; no copy of the message there, and no info on the site about the breach. I go look up their customer service 888 number and call that; it's already closed for the night, and the message there says nothing about the problem. There's an 877 number in the email I got, but the only google hit for that is a copy of this very email, and the guy who answers it admits it was newly registered to deal with this problem. So, um, how do I know I'm talking to Checkfree? The email did contain my name and the out-of-date address I have on file with them, but of course, if their site was actually hacked, that doesn't tell me anything - and that much is public record anyways. So, it's great they sent out a timely message about their breach. But I got it on Saturday night, and it appears there's no authenticatable method of contacting them for further information until Monday. Checkfree Corp obviously has no clue about security and social engineering. Unfortunately I'm not sure there are any better options, since most billpay sites end up using Checkfree on the back-end. Anyone have any suggestions for other sites that do bill presentment and payment for Duke Energy and AT&T that don't use Checkfree? ETA: Here's an article about the breach. So it would seem a Checkfree employee fell prey to a phishing attack and leaked their password with Network Solutions for domain registration. And now they're sending out emails to customers that are indistinguishable from a phishing attack. That's some astounding incompetence. |
| Saturday, December 6th, 2008 | |
| 3:34 pm | More books In addition to the The Week and The Economist (shockingly, both delivered on Saturday this week, as they're supposed to be but so rarely are (I do so loathe the Raleigh USPS)), and the new issue of Locus, today's mail included book deliveries from two of my favorite publishers, PS Publishing and Lethe Press:
From PS, the new issue of Postscripts, reprint Bradbury collection The Day It Rained Forever, novellas Living with the Dead by Darrell Schweitzer and The City in These Pages by John Grant, and the new "PS Showcase" collection by Douglas Smith (with an introduction by Chaz Brenchley ( desperance)). And from Lethe, Sea, Swallow Me, a collection by Craig Laurance Gidney (ethereal_lad), which includes Spectrum Award shortlisted "A Bird of Ice" along with 5 other reprints and 4 new stories.On an entirely unrelated note, do people give Christmas bonuses to newspaper carriers nowadays? Today's News & Observer included the usual December "Happy Holidays" insert with my carrier's home address on it. I assume that's a discreet way of asking for a Christmas bonus, but I've always felt like it'd be weird to mail a check for that to somebody I've never even met. And how much would even be appropriate? |
| Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | |
| 6:58 pm | Hot men and kittens! In addition to the new issues of F&SF, my favorite CD review mag International Record Review, and the always interesting McSweeney's, my long delayed copy of Spore, and the chapbooks Redemption Roadshow by Weston Ochse (Burning Effigy Press) and Leftovers by Steve Vernon (Magus Press), today's mail includes what has to be the best 2009 calendar in existence:
Hot men and kittens in one beautiful calendar! And it benefits a good cause. Get your own copy today with a $20 donation to the Hull Seaside Animal Rescue. |
| Monday, December 1st, 2008 | |
| 9:59 pm | Too much mail I'd forgotten what it's like to come home to a week's worth of mail all at once:
That's just what actually came home from my box at The UPS Store; all the junk mail and extraneous packaging has been trashed already. The squirrel plushy is a "free gift" from amazon accompanying Rune Factory 2. Other games on the stack are Luminous Arc 2, The Last Remnant, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and Soul Calibur IV. Below those are books and booklike magazines: The Hounds of Skaith by Leigh Brackett (Planet Stories), The Dark World by Henry Kuttner (Planet Stories), The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs and the Currently Accepted Habits of Nature by David Niall Wilson (Bad Moon Books), Population Zero by Wrath James White (Cargo Cult Press), Islington Crocodiles by Paul Meloy (TTA Press), Crimewave Ten: Now You See Me (TTA Press), The New York Tyrant Vol. 2 No. 2, Subterfuge (Special Edition) edited by Ian Whates (Newcon Press), the poetry chapbook War by Harold Pinter (Faber & Faber), Cool Thing: The Best New Gay Fiction from Young American Writers edited by Blair Mastbaum & Will Fabro (Running Press), The Best of Lucius Shepard (with accompanying volume Skull City and Other Lost Stories) (Subterranean Press), and Marveltown by Bruce McCall (FSG). Magazines are new issues of The Week, The Economist, The New Yorker, Black: Australian Dark Culture, the now sadly ended Flytrap, The Lutheran, The Advocate, Realms of Fantasy, Consumer Reports, Genre, Sport Diver, Out, Weird Tales, Gramophone, Talebones, One Story, Overland, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New York Observer. I guess I should go read some stuff now. |
| Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | |
| 11:56 pm | Daily tweets Yesterday's tweets: |
| Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | |
| 4:58 am | Daily tweets Yesterday's tweets: |
| Monday, November 24th, 2008 | |
| 4:17 am | Daily tweets Yesterday's tweets: |
| Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | |
| 4:32 am | Daily tweets Yesterday's tweets: |
| Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | |
| 4:12 am | Daily tweets Yesterday's tweets: |
| Friday, November 21st, 2008 | |
| 4:29 am | Daily tweets Yesterday's tweets: |
